andrewcoppin:
Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
See also the older NewBinary, http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/NewBinary-0.1
Now that's just ironic...
Incidentally, I've been thinking. You *might* want the binary representation of things if you were going to, say, compress or encrypt data before putting it into a file or whatever. Actually in Java (bleeeh) you can wrap things around a stream so that data gets compressed and transformed between where the program writes it, and where it hits the endpoint. Haskell doesn't have a library for this, and I don't immediately see how to implement one. It would be darn useful to have a standard setup for this though. That way, when somebody wants to implement a new way to do zlib compression or a SHA-256 implementation or... there will already be a standardised way to access the binary representation of data without having to write it to a file.
(If any of that made sense...)?)
Our zlib and bzlib2 bindings operate on in-memory lazy bytestrings. They thus provide: compress :: ByteString -> ByteString and its inverse. So you can chain them with decoding: writeFile "foo.gz" . compress . encode $ myvalue -- Don